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Why do some people coerce people into doing things? Why do others invite people into creative, collaborative work together? Which is more powerful? Which one is more resilient?

Power is the amount of energy for a given period of time. In physics it is calculated as the work done over a period of time. More power can get more work done in the same amount of time. Power, or the energy available, to get things done can be used to get things done for oneself or for others.

There is an old saying that power corrupts. Having power often leads people to the power paradox: while they get their power–the energy to get things done–from others because of their work for others, they can also begin to use the power to do things for themselves. In the power paradox, people who begin to use their power for their own ends, start to lose their access to and grip on power. To maintain their relative power, they have three options. They can get more power through co-benefit, by doing things that benefit others, who give them the energy to do work. They can co-opt the energy of others through coercion, forcing others to give them their energy. They can decrease the power of others, through coercion, tipping the balance of power back in their own favor. So, people can increase their relative power by (1) doing good for others, (2) coercing others, or (3) decreasing the power of others. With the first, power is co-generated–they get more power, and others keep their power. With the second, power is diffused–they get more power, and others lose their power. With the third, power is dissipated–others lose their power to heat, to self-preservation. The first is generative. The second and third are coercive and destructive.

In coercive efforts, the power of others is diminished. It is co-opted by the coercive enforcer, taking the other’s energy, their will, and using it for the coercer’s purposes. This can be done consciously and unconsciously. In conscious coercion, the coerced know they are being coerced, that their energy is being usurped for another person’ purposes. Bullying fits in this category. In unconscious coercion, the coerced have often unconsciously accepted a set of agreements where their energy is used by the coercer for the coercer’s purposes, without the coercer knowing that this is what they are doing. Many social settings fit this category, such as the use of fiat currencies to enrich the currency owners–we get loans and pay interest rates, with no clue as to how the monetary system works.

In collaborative efforts, the power of each individual and of the group is increased. The energy is co-generated by the impact resulting from the engaging and leveraging of the unique contributions of each individual. Everyone keeps their power and ends up with more.

In coercion, someone ends up with more, and others end up with less. In collaboration, everyone ends up with more. Which leads to greater resilience?

To have energy resilience, in the form of creativity available to do work, you need more human creative energy available to you than you use. I am currently working on a model of human creative energy, which I call Homo lumens, where humans are beings of light energy, which comes straight from physics. One challenge with energy resilience in human creativity is that the creative energy seems to dissipate very quickly. We seem to have a creative moment, whether thinking of new possibilities, answering a question, or seeing how to apply a screwdriver to a screw. They all take an instant of human creativity, of lumens. To be resilient, we need to have enough lumens being generated to use in all of the required applications. If this creative energy dissipates quickly, then essentially all of the lumens energy generated goes either into a specific activity or it is dissipated, used in some other way. Following this logic, having more creative energy generated than is engaged in specific activities leads to more creative energy being dissipated. This is inefficient. Putting more energy into the system with the same output is less efficient, a waste of creative energy. This probably leads to burnout, to people being disengaged or otherwise-engaged.

Energy resilience, whether in calories or lumens, seems to lead to a question of resilience versus efficiency. Since both calories and lumens dissipate relatively quickly, we need to have constant access to them. The activity of accessing them requires even more access to energy sources. Having access to more than we need becomes inefficient. We spend energy accessing energy that will dissipate before we can use it–wasted food, wasted creativity. Not very smart. Not having access to enough leads to low resilience, the inability to continue to function when the environment changes. Not very smart either. This suggests that to be smart, we have to figure out how to increase our access to energy, whether calories or lumens, without increasing the energy used to access it or losing lots of energy to dissipation. One way to do that is by increasing the ability to access and tangibilize the potential energy available, without expending much more energy. Until we need the energy, it remains in its potential form. When we need it, we tangibilize it. I explore how to do this, through our agreements fields, in a previous post.

Weak Agreements Fields. When agreements fields are weak, we experience little capacity to making something with the available potential energy. Though we might see the potential in individuals and in the group, our agreements make it hard to work with that potential: we tend to focus more on getting the required outcomes, and much less on developing capacities and relationships or on seeing and engaging potential. To be responsible to the resilience of the group’s efforts, in weak agreements fields, we tend to try to increase resilience by increasing the flexibility of our capacity to get people to do work–our resource of human bodies. From this perspective, we need to be able to scale up and down the number of human bodies available to do work. When we need more output, we contract more bodies, and when we need less output, we contract fewer bodies. We can do this more efficiently by contracting that pool of labor–bodies to do work–and keeping investment in their training and benefits low. This leads us to focus on having flexible financial capital to be able to scale the number of contracted bodies available. Does the liquidity of this flexibility of capital reduce the return on investment, since it needs to be more readily available?

Strong Agreements Fields. When agreements fields are strong, we experience a high capacity to tangibilize the potential energy available in our interactions, by definition. We see potential, pathways to manifest that potential, and we use the outcomes of those pathways as feedback about the potential and pathways we saw. In strong agreements fields, we seem to increase resilience by increasing the capacity of our interactions to leverage our inputs, by working with the reenforcing and balancing feedback loops in our interactions and in the viral nature of our social networks. We study our interactions to find leverage through the nature of social systems. This allows us to scale efficiency, achieving much greater outputs with the same inputs, the same number of people with the same level of financial capital. By keeping the same people, we want to invest in their capacities and their benefits. This leads us to focus on being more strategic, more systemic, and more collaborative, as a way to engage and learn from the potential energy available to us in the strong agreements field.

If agreements fields have within them the capacity to tangibilize the potential energy available in the individuals present and in their interactions, strong agreements fields seem to engage our intention and our attention–what we do for what reasons and what we focus on–in very different ways than do weak agreements fields. I am curious what you find in these two different settings.

Everyone lives in complex, turbulent times. Will our agreements survive the changes we face? How resilient are these agreements? We can look to ecologists for how to think about the resilience of systems and to anthropologists for what has actually happened in human systems.

Thus, ecologists and anthropologists observe that a more resilient set of agreements is more capable of dealing with changing environments without losing whole levels of complexity in the agreements. You can find more on the ecosynomics of impact resilience here.

Recent research shows that where most of us hear noise, the din of a lot of people speaking at once, some people, in this case musicians, can pick out a single voice and the overall harmonic. Researchers call this the “cocktail party effect,” where lots of people are speaking loudly at the same time, making it hard to hear anything. That most of us cannot pick out what one voice is saying in the noise of a lot of loud conversation doesn’t mean that nobody can. Maybe it is a matter of intention and training; the desire to hear different voices and the practice at doing so. In this case, the musicians need to be able to pick out specific voices or instruments in the mix, and they have a lot of practice doing so. Intention and practice.

My colleagues and I work with many groups that are taking on very complex social issues. To address these complex issues, in a resilient way, collaborative processes often require many stakeholder groups to contribute their unique gifts and perspectives. They are part of the problem and part of the solution, so they need to be involved. And, they bring quite different perspectives, by definition, of the issue and what they can contribute to the shared intention. Like with the “cocktail party effect” research with musicians, I find that while most people find it difficult to perceive and value different perspectives in complex social issues, some people can do this. They have the intention and the practice. Our ecosynomic processes for working with complex social issues support people in building the capacity to do this, both the intention and the practice–learning how to listen for other unique voices and the practice in doing so. I see that this is a required skill for addressing complex social issues, a skill we can learn from the example of the musicians.